Top Five Animal Geeks

I found this list from C/Net... This was edited for easier reading and to add another animal.


05) Laika The cosmonaut Dog
--- Was shot into space
Laika was found as a straw wandering the streets of Moscow. She was launched into space in Sputnik 3 on November 3, 1957. Laika died a few hours after launch from stress and overheating, likely due to a malfunction in the thermal control system. The true cause of her death was not made public until decades after the flight. Although Laika did not survive the trip, the experiment proved that a living passenger could survive being launched into orbit. It paved the way for human space flight and provided scientists with some of the first data on how living organisms react to space flight environments.

04) Dolly The Sheep
--- Lost her Individuality
Dolly, the first successfully cloned mammal, is now deceased and her lovingly stuffed carcass can be viewed at the Royal Museum in Edinburgh. She was cloned from a cell in 1996 and was genetically identical to her 'mother'. Scientists have speculated that Dolly's premature death may have been a result of her source genetic material coming from a six-year-old ewe. This may have meant that Dolly was genetically already six years old when born. Dolly achieved significant celebrity, but never appeared in any major television shows or a motion picture. She is, however, the geekiest sheep in all of history.

03) Schrödinger's Cat
--- Feline Paradox
Schrödinger's cat is a hypothetical animal used to demonstrate a 'quantum superposition' where 'dead' and 'alive' states coexist. It's enough to blow your mind, so skip onwards if your office party was yesterday. If a cat was put in a box with a poison that could be released at a completely random time by the decay of a radioactive isotope, the cat could be either alive or dead at the same time from the point of view of anyone outside the box. This describes quantum superposition and decoherance. One qualified physics expert described it as something along the lines of: "If a tree were to fall in the woods and no one was there to hear it, would it make a noise?"

02) Pavlov's Dog
--- Dribbling Pioneer
Ivan Pavlov used many dogs in his famous experiments, but only one remains morbidly preserved in the Pavlov Museum. The Russian scientist discovered a phenomena known as 'classical conditioning'. Using dogs as his test subjects, Pavlov monitored the amount of saliva an animal produces when exposed to food under different circumstances. He soon discovered that the dogs would salivate in anticipation of food if other stimuli (such as the ringing of a bell) previously associated with food were present. Pavlov could effectively make his dog salivate by ringing a bell even if there was no food to eat -- a heartlessly cruel but fascinating achievement.

01) Ham the Astrochimp
--- First Chimp in Space
Other than sitting calmly in his biopack, Ham's only task on his Project Mercury space mission was to push a lever when he saw a flashing blue light. Although he performed the task flawlessly, scientists had rigged an incentive in the form of electrodes on Ham's feet. These would send a persuasive shock to the chimpanzee should he dawdle. Luckily for Ham, his little arm reached out tentatively and pulled the lever soon after his capsule entered space, on 31 January 1961. Ham splashed down in the ocean and went on to live until the grand old age of 27. He spent most of his remaining time on earth as a celebrity, appearing on television and in a film with Evel Knievel.


Extra Reading